"Funny like he knew you," said Brother, who almost never said anything, and then went back to talking about the Browns.
I want to explain about my life then, so you understand what it meant that I stood at the window for a full minute after the bus left, which I never did, with a wet rag in my hand dripping on the linoleum.
I was thirty-eight years old. I lived in the house I grew up in, on Fifth Street in Struthers, a two-story frame house with green asbestos shingles and a front porch whose third step had been rotten since Carter. I lived there with my father, Mickey Kovach, who had worked twenty-nine years on the open hearth at the Campbell Works and come out of it with a pension that the bankruptcy lawyers were still chewing on, a gold watch that didn't keep time, and lungs that sounded, when he climbed the stairs, like somebody dragging a rake across a gravel drive. Emphysema, the doctor at St. Elizabeth's said, and the mill, and the Pall Malls, and the mill. He'd been on oxygen since the spring, a green tank on a little two-wheeled cart that he called Lady Bird and pulled around the house behind him by a handle like a suitcase. The oxygen came from a company in Boardman that billed us monthly and was in no way satisfied with what Medicare thought it ought to be paid. My mother had died in 1980 of a stroke at the kitchen sink. There was a dent in the linoleum where she fell that I had never been able to look at straight and never been able to afford to replace.
I had been married once, to Len Lesko, from 1967 to 1978. Len was a crane man at the Sheet and Tube who could dance a polka with you at the Slovak Club so fast your shoes came off. He was not a bad man. He was a man who did not know what to do with grief except leave the room it was in, and when the mill closed he left that room too, and went to Houston for the oil rigs, and sent money, and then postcards, and then the papers. I signed them at this very counter, on my break, with Helen's pen.
Before all that, there was Katie. I will tell you about Katie when I can. I'm not very good at it yet, even now.
That night I got home at quarter after seven, because Marge's Pinto had thrown a belt and I'd covered the first four hours of her shift. I came in through the back door into the kitchen and Pop was at the table under the light, in his undershirt, with the oxygen cannula in his nose and the tank beside him, doing the Jumble in the Vindicator. Wheel of Fortune was on in the front room, loud enough to hear from the kitchen, Pat Sajak telling somebody they'd hit Bankrupt. Pop never watched it. He just liked the noise.
"There's a letter from the Dollar Bank," he said without looking up.
"I saw it." I'd seen it yesterday. I'd put it in the drawer under the phone with the others.
"You want to open it?"
"No."
"Okay," he said, and wrote a letter in a box. Then he said, "You want to tell me what's wrong with your face?"